Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  Then Claire tells him everything. But only in her head. In fact she only looks up at him, a man with handcuffs clipped to his belt, knowing that he could drop her, force a knee to her back, clip her wrists, pepper-spray her face in less than a minute. She finds it so strange that this is the situation she is in when about a month ago, around this same time of the day, she was sitting down to lunch with her parents—grilled ham and cheese, that was what they ate, along with small bowls of tomato soup—while NPR played from the faux-antique radio on the kitchen counter. The most ordinary thing in the world made suddenly extraordinary by the fact that she would never experience it again.

  “What?” The trooper lifts the mug to his mouth and the straw becomes as dark as a vein when he sucks from it. “What do you want?”

  She feels so naked under his gaze, under the fluorescent lights that hide nothing and make everyone appear as though they are dying. She imagines what she must look like to him: oversize coat, ratty hair, greasy skin, a faded bruise with an angry red gash running across her forehead. A runaway. That’s what he’ll think. And then he’ll make the connection—he’ll realize she is the girl—the one from the notice that could very well be circulating through every police station in the Upper Midwest.

  She takes a step back and the rack rattles behind her and for a moment she can’t help but think of that card, the stupid one with the cartooned family on it. In her mind it flips open as her mouth opens and she says, “My friend says you can go seven miles over the speed limit and not get pulled over.” With every word she expects her voice to shake, but it doesn’t. “That you guys have, like, a seven-mile-per-hour cushion you give people. Is that true?”

  “Don’t speed,” he says.

  “Okay. I won’t. But do you?”

  “I don’t speed.”

  Inside the card. MOM. Mother of Multiples. M-O-M. An acronym. She is a few seconds behind the conversation when she says, “But do you pull people over if they’re only seven miles over?”

  He sips again from his soda and then sets it in front of the register for the clerk to ring up. “Everybody is different. Maybe it will be your day to get pulled over and maybe it won’t. Maybe I’m feeling nice or maybe I’m feeling mean.” He digs in his pocket and rattles out some change. Behind him a wall of cigarettes and lighters and energy pills. “The next time you think about doing something foolish, think of me mean.”

  “I will,” she says, but he is already out the door and she has already forgotten him. Her backpack drops to the floor and she digs through it for a pen and paper. Her eyes are blinking rapid-fire and her jaw is clamped so tightly it clicks. Her mind cycles through the constellations. “Grus. Octans,” she says. “Taurus. Orion. Mensa. Indus. Reticulum.” She continues to speak to the empty store, her voice solemn, as if performing some ancient rite. “Indus. Aries. Musca.”

  Chapter 10

  MIRIAM IS TIRED of waiting. For two weeks she has remained in the cabin, pacing the hardwood floors, waiting for the power to flicker out, the water to gurgle to a stop in the faucet. Her neck aches from sleeping in the bathtub. Her teeth ache from grinding. Her eyes ache from peering constantly out the slots sawed into the plywood sheets hammered to the windows.

  Sometimes she thinks she hears laughter in the forest. Sometimes the motion detectors go off and bring a ghostly pallor to the night. One morning she woke to a thunk against the front door and thought dreamily to herself, it’s the paper, only to later discover a rabbit bleeding out on the welcome mat. Otherwise, two weeks of nothing.

  She has never gone this long without transforming. She doesn’t trust that part of herself these days, like an alcoholic eyeing a whiskey bottle, knowing the promise of one sip will lead to a gurgling swallow and the night will end with broken dishes, bruised flesh, sirens. She will either tear apart the cabin or claw her way outside.

  She tries to keep herself occupied. She jumps rope until her legs ache. She does push-ups and crunches on the oval rug in the middle of the living room. She plays chess, spinning the board with every turn, pretending herself the enemy. She reads her way through the paperbacks on the bookcase, among them a Dover edition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The bottom shelf is crowded with children’s stories and on more than one occasion she opens them as if to make sure their words and drawings haven’t vanished. Her eyes flit to her husband’s book—a self-published manifesto the size of a brick called The Revolution—its cover bearing the image of a man casting a wolf’s shadow, but this is a book she won’t read, no matter how bored she gets.

  She crunches her way through a bag of tortilla chips and then licks her finger to pilfer the crumbs and salt. She eats peanuts, Oreos, Nutri-Grain bars. She cracks six eggs and grates cheese and chops peppers and stirs up a steaming omelet. She always has a coffee in hand, the mug clacking against her teeth. She is so hungry.

  Tonight is especially bad. The moon is nearly full, and it pulls at her blood. Her mouth drowns in saliva. Her muscles feel like tightly coiled springs that no amount of stretching can loosen. She gnashes her teeth and breathes as though back from a run. Every noise draws her to the window, gun in hand. Every shadow makes her eyes narrow. She walks from room to room, a clockwise rotation of the windows of the house, peering out into the clearing walled by woods.

  She keeps the cabin dark so as not to ruin her night vision, and the slots in the windows glow like slanted blue eyes. In the living room she drops to the floor and hurries out a set of twenty-five push-ups. After the last rep she pauses with her chest and cheek against the rug. She does not breathe. Something has changed. She can sense it like an open door, a shift in sound and pressure.

  She rises slowly from the floor and approaches the front window and releases the safety. The slot is the size of a ruler and she must press her eyes against the wood to get any sort of view. Splinters chafe her nose and forehead. A good minute passes before she sees, at the edge of the woods, a shadow come alive and separate itself from the rest, moving into the clearing, seeming very much a part of the forest, with its antlers forking upward like a cluster of branches and the band of white beneath its muzzle as bright as the moon rising over the tree line. A buck.

  She closes her eyes, and when they snap open the rest of the world has fallen away, except for the deer, as if spotlighted. It lowers its head now to taste some grass, and she too opens her mouth and runs her tongue along her teeth. Through her body she feels a rush of blood that finds its focus in her chest, a throbbing pressure. She imagines her rib cage as a cell that cannot contain much longer the black fingers gripping it, shaking it.

  If she does not hurry, the deer will step into the range of the motion detector and the explosion of light will startle it away. The door is braced by three two-by-fours. She sets down the gun and picks up the drill and hesitates, knowing the deer will hear the sound. She rattles around in a junk drawer for a screwdriver instead. She hardly notices the cramps in her hand when she twists out the eight screws the length of her finger.

  The voice that scolds her, that begs restraint, that tells her to stay put, is a mere whimper, easily ignored. She sheds her clothes like a skin no longer needed. When she pulls open the door, ripping off the two-by-fours, and takes in her first shuddering breath of fresh air in two weeks—when she steps across the threshold, from the shadowy pocket of the cabin to the moonlit expanse of the night—she is already changing, the process as simple and liquid for her as diving into a pond.

  The deer raises its head to study her. Its eyes black. Its ears twitching. It lifts one of its hooves, ready to move—and then, when she starts off the porch at a dead sprint, it twists away from her, bounding toward the cover of the trees. The motion detector flashes—instant daylight—and throws her shadow before her, a long black seam she pursues.

  The wind shushes her ears, trembles her hair, making her feel as though she rides its currents, weaving past trees and cutting through bushes and curling over logs, the deer always within sight. It is faster than her but compro
mised by its size. Its body thuds off tree trunks; its antlers clack against low-hanging branches, finally tangling in one, dragging the deer to a stop.

  It shakes its head furiously, trying to tear away from the tree. Wood cracks but does not give. Needles rain down. The weight of her body knocks the deer free, the two of them a mess of flailing limbs, and then it is too late, her claws dragging across its throat. Its bones are pearly. Its blood is warm and steams like a ghost released. For a long time she is lost to hunger.

  Then her muscles tighten, knot up. For the first time she feels the air’s chill. She is aware of herself as a wolf and a woman, the woman only faintly realized, like a burr in a sock, an abrasion that makes her lift her head from the carcass and recognize the danger of the night.

  A cloud spills over the moon and momentarily dims the forest. She feels a pang of dread and rises from her crouch. Her sense of smell is compromised by the blood that sleeves her arms, masks her face, clots the hair that has risen from her skin. A scudding sound makes her flip around. The moon breaks from the clouds and splashes its light across what at first appears to be a boulder furred over with moss.

  Its eyes sparkle like bits of quartz and its teeth glimmer when it rises into the massive figure of Morris Magog. She can see his breath trailing upward and imagines it as hot as the breath of an oven.

  She does not whimper. She is not paralyzed by the terrible sight of him. A gust of wind is the only prompting she needs. She runs on all fours, letting the wolf lead her. Branches claw at her. The deer’s blood dries against her in a tacky patina. The thrill of the earlier chase is gone, replaced by a cold, emotionless need to escape. Fear can come later.

  She never glances over her shoulder, but she can hear his passage close behind—wood snapping, a deep-throated growling that sounds like shifting stone—and she can picture him clearly enough, appearing more bear than wolf, a surging mass of hair and muscle with a mouth of darkest black.

  There it is. The woods open into a clearing with a driveway snaking through it. The shed. The Ramcharger. The squat shape of the cabin. She feels more vulnerable in the open space and wonders for the first time if Magog is alone. An explosion of light blinds her. The motion detector. Through the yellow haze she finds the steps and clambers up them—the open door waits for her, a rectangular black slash that she dives through. She does not allow herself the time to look, to see how close he is behind her, but slams the deadbolt home and backs away from the door, certain it will explode inward at any moment.

  Already she is retreating into her human form, and as always she feels small and bewildered and achy, like someone rising from a dreamscape to find herself gripped by a hangover. Without looking, she crabs her hand across the coffee table and finds the Glock.

  She knows she should retrieve the shotgun, the machete, the extra clips of ammo. But right now her body only wants to curl up in the corner, the wood of the wall digging into her naked back. She hears the porch boards rasp. And then, a moment later, a faint scratching at the door, a nail teased across its exterior. The knob turns slowly—catches against the lock—then rattles back into place.

  A minute passes. The motion detector clicks off. The harsh white light is replaced by a watery blue glow seeping through the window slots. One of them goes suddenly dark. She breathes through her nose with a high-pitched whistle. She wills her body to recede into the wall, to appear as another piece of furniture in the room. She aims the Glock. Her finger tightens on the trigger. A half pound of pressure is all it takes.

  The darkness retreats and the space glows blue again—and then, a moment later, white, the motion detector activated.

  She does not feel relieved. She feels like she has a noose around her neck and it is only a matter of time before the trapdoor gives out beneath her. She waits for one of the longest silences of her life, barely breathing in an effort to listen more closely. Then the cabin shakes as something lights upon the roof. She does not cry out but brings a hand to her mouth and bites down on it.

  The pitched ceiling is made of tongue-and-groove fitted pine planks. When the footsteps come, slow and thudding, fifty years of dust rains down. She blinks away the grit in her eyes and squeezes the pistol so tightly that the grip bites her palm. She concentrates on the impact of each footstep, the complaint of the wood, until she feels she could sketch a circle on the ceiling that targets Magog.

  He is fucking with her. She is done being fucked with. She raises the Glock and fires.

  She squeezes off five rounds, and the spent hulls litter her lap and burn her but she hardly notices. The cabin quakes as though struck by a car. She has hit her mark. The fallen body rolls, thundering its way down the roof. There comes a brief silence punctuated by a heavy whump.

  Chapter 11

  CHASE REMEMBERS the first time he talked to Augustus. Seventh grade, Obsidian Junior High, after gym class, he walks into the locker room. Showers sizzle. Steam fills the air. Boys are scrubbing their armpits with soap or toweling off in front of their open lockers. He spins his combo and pauses before yanking the lock—because of the voices he hears, jeering, laughing like jackals.

  Three boys—still in their shorts and tank tops—stand outside a toilet stall and kick at the door hard enough to dent the thin sheet metal. “Come on,” they say. “Come out and show us your pussy.” Another kick and the door jars open.

  Chase recognizes the kid inside. They’re in the same section of math, and the other day, in line at the cafeteria, a girl wearing bell-bottoms and her hair pulled back in a ponytail turned to the kid, who had accidentally rubbed up against her, and said, “Don’t touch me. You haven’t even gone through puberty yet.”

  He wears small glasses on a head too big for his body. His hair is the wispy blond of cornsilk. His arms and legs are stumpy, his torso round. All of this giving him the appearance of an enormous baby.

  The same can’t be said of Chase, who feels so much younger than his body. A few years ago his bones began to ache and he developed a vicious hunger, gobbling up six eggs for breakfast, a whole pizza for dinner, sucking down five gallons of milk every week. He studied himself often in the mirror, as his limbs stretched to match his oversize feet, his hands, what his mother called puppy paws. He started rubbing himself off in fifth grade, shaving in sixth grade with his father’s razor and Barbasol. He is taller than most of his teachers and plays forward on the varsity basketball team.

  He’s not a good guy—he knows that has nothing to do with what happens next. He hates the Methodist church his parents drag him to every Sunday and smokes cigarettes under the football bleachers and sneaks cheat sheets into exams and every chance he gets tries to slide his hand up a girl’s skirt. But most of his trespasses have to do with pleasure, seeking it out, the buzz of a beer, the way a blow job makes his whole body feel like a tingly nerve ending.

  He’s not a bad guy either—he has a certain sense of righteousness motivated now by these three punks, with their braces and pimply backs, getting off on ganging up on somebody weaker than them.

  From what Chase gathers, as he moves toward them, the kid has been camping out in the toilet stall after gym, skipping his shower, changing where no one can observe him. A pile of clothes remains in the stall as he is dragged across the wet tile floor, half-dressed in a button-up short-sleeve and white briefs that match the paleness of his skin. He struggles but does not cry out when the boys reach for his underwear and try to yank it off him.

  Chase comes up behind them. Without pause he kicks one of the boys square in the ass and sends him keeling into the wall—striking it with a wet thud, crumpling into a mewling ball. Chase cracks together the skulls of the other two boys and then shoves them headfirst into the nearby urinals. He holds them there for a good five seconds, mashing their mouths into the deodorant pucks. Then he slams the flush bars and leaves them sputtering.

  The kid has gathered up his clothes. His face is impassive, and his glasses have fogged over, hiding his eyes. Neither of them says anyt
hing. Not until the next day, after algebra, when the kid introduces himself as Augustus and asks what he can do for Chase.

  “You don’t owe me nothing.”

  The rest of the class is filing out of the room, glancing at the strange pair, Augustus standing with his arms crossed and Chase sitting with his legs sprawled out, their height about equal. “I disagree,” the kid says. “And maybe you will as well when you hear my proposal.” The precision of the kid’s words, the confident purse of his mouth—the white short-sleeve shirt, like something an accountant would wear in the summer. Chase might as well be having a conversation with an alien. He has no idea how to respond and finds he doesn’t have to, because the kid is filling the silence, explaining how, if protected, Augustus will do any homework assignments Chase finds tiresome.

  “I’m not stupid. And I’m not looking for help.” Chase is less angered than amused. “My grades are fine.”

  “You have obligations I do not: sports and socializing. Homework gets in the way of these, yes? If you feel like completing your assignments on your own, great. But if on occasion you have an away game or a hot, sexy date—then you will hand the work off to me and I will happily oblige.”

  “And for this I kick anybody’s ass who messes with you?”

  A curt nod. “Tit for tat.”

  Chase stands. He towers over the kid, could smash him into his backpack if he wanted. “We don’t have to hang out or anything, do we?”

  “Not unless you want to.”

  “I don’t.”

  A contract they have more or less honored for the past thirty years.

  Chase has never called Augustus by his name. It was a mouthful, and obnoxious, the name of some old poet who liked to write about the pansies growing in his garden. The kid. That’s what Chase called him—until they enrolled at the University of Oregon, when the kid took Chase aside during orientation and said he would rather not be called that anymore.